A Taste of Rose and Lychee Sushan - A. Introduction

My illegitimate younger brother stole my name and used it to rob a fallen scholar of his innocence at the Southern Breeze House.

He promised to clear the man’s family of their false charges.

Instead, he degraded him day after day, then passed him from one man to another as a gift, trading him for money and power.

Buried in official business, I knew nothing of it.

Not until my brother’s wedding day, when someone stopped his horse in the street and was nearly run through the chest by a guard’s sword.

“Chongdie begs an audience with the eldest young master!”

The anger and desperate resolve in the young man’s foxlike eyes died the moment he saw my face.

“How could I have been such a fool?”

“Father, Mother… I cannot avenge you.”

In my last life, I saved Chongdie when he tried to kill himself. I overturned his family’s conviction and freed him from the servile registers.

I told him he was free. If he still wished to sit the imperial examinations, I would recommend him.

But his last wish had been fulfilled, and there was nothing left to sustain him. He did not survive that winter.

I lived for more than sixty years after him.

Then I closed my eyes, opened them again, and found myself back on the day my brother stole my private seal.